To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

— Susan Sontag

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

— Susan Sontag

To the militant, identity is everything.

— Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

— Susan Sontag

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

— Susan Sontag

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

— Susan Sontag

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the

— Susan Sontag

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). Furthermore, we want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. Furthermore, we dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

— Susan Sontag

We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. Furthermore, we truly can't imagine what it was like. Furthermore, we can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

— Susan Sontag

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

— Susan Sontag